How to streamline the graphic design process with Adobe Express.

Summary/Overview

The graphic design process is a vital part of content creation, helping you produce high-quality, engaging assets for your market. Businesses worldwide are investing more into their graphic design to optimise project workflow, attract audiences and stand out from the competition. It’s no longer just something businesses do on a whim – failure to keep up with graphic design trends can render your brand outdated and bland.

Looking for ways to improve your graphic design processes? Adobe Express has the tools, tips and tricks to help you take your designs to the next level.

What is a graphic design process?

The graphic design process is a set of steps followed by a graphic designer to bring their design ideas to life. Although a graphic designer’s job is very creative, these steps are required to help meet client requests and stay brand compliant. It’s a structured approach that takes a design from ideation to finished product.

The first stage of the design process is usually a detailed design brief, provided by your client or internal team. This should outline the project's objectives, target audience and specific requirements, acting as the foundation for the entire process. Designers will then start working on sketches to test out different ideas. From there, edits, adjustments and reviews will take place until the client is happy with the finished product.

Why is process so important for your graphic design projects?

Having an effective graphic design process in place can benefit businesses in many ways. Whether your design team is in-house, agency-based or freelance, establishing a design process enables better workflow management.

Prioritising quality, target audiences and brand compliance in your graphic design process can bring advantages, such as:

• Boosting organisation. Having step by step stages for your graphic design process can help to add a new level of organisation to your content creation. This makes the overall process more efficient, potentially saving you time and money.
• Helps manage expectations. The graphic design process should include a standard sequence of stages that all team members are aware of. This can help to set timeframes and deadlines, keeping everyone well-informed with the status of creation.
• Encourages teamwork. Establishing an effective design process can improve teamwork and alignment within your business. With clarity on the design plan, objectives, main contacts and key dates, everyone can work seamlessly and in sync.
• Improves the creative process. The graphic design process serves as a workflow template, and templates in all forms are useful for businesses – often proving to be time and cost effective.
• Opportunities to review. A thorough design process will provide an opportunity for your team to test and review content, helping to ensure that the final product aligns with the client’s brief as much as possible.

Explore free editable graphic design templates.

Ready to streamline your graphic design process with Adobe Express?

Adobe Express can help you improve your graphic design process and streamline your project workflow. Our innovative tools are designed to make every aspect of design and creation easier and more efficient.

Here’s how Adobe Express for Business can help:

1. Ensure you’re crafting consistent content.

Developing consistent, brand compliant content can help you to establish a unique brand identity that’s easily identifiable to your target audience. Not only can this set you apart from the competition, but it can also make the creative process simpler and more efficient.

With Adobe Express, you can create your own brand kits for your team to use. Easily apply brand colours, fonts, and assets in just one click to ensure consistency across your designs and projects.

2. Make the most of templates to save time.

Using templates from Adobe Express can help you speed up the graphic design process too. Whether you’re creating flyers, brochures or social media posts, you’re sure to find a suitable template from our library of assets.

Specify your niche using the search bar and customise each template to suit your brand. We even have templates that are particularly useful for graphic design, like our graphic banners and logos.

Once you’ve found the templates that work best for your brand, you can use our Favourites Tool to make them easily accessible to your team for future projects. From there, you can bulk create and generate your designs to provide a wider variety of assets for key stakeholders to pick from.

3. Look for opportunities to use generative AI.

With Adobe Express, you can make use of Adobe Firefly generative AI tools to boost your levels of efficiency in graphic design and beyond. AI can bring your ideas to life in a flash, accelerating workflows and helping to make processes more streamlined.

For example, you can easily generate images with a simple text prompt, or edit and resize content with ease. Additionally, your design team can auto translate text into 45 different languages – a great resource if you’re looking to adapt and promote your designs worldwide.

4. Keep track and collaborate.

Adobe Express makes keeping track of your graphic design processes and collaborating with others easy to do. The Adobe Experience Manager takes control of every aspect of the design process. This can help you ensure that deadlines are met, and the overall workflow is running seamlessly.

To make collaborating with others easy to do, you can host pages and generate unique URLs for the content you publish then share as you wish. Invite other teams to collaborate on your designs, where they can post comments, tag other colleagues, and resolve comments in one place to keep everything streamlined. Plus, any Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files you create are automatically synced to any project in Adobe Express.

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Useful things to know.

How can I speed up the graphic design process?

One of the best ways to speed up the graphic design process is to use templates. This means you don’t have to start from scratch, helping to save time and resources. Adobe Express offers a range of easily customisable templates for you to use in the design process, plus generative AI tools to make creating assets even quicker.

What is the life cycle behind a graphic design project?

Typically, there are five phases within the project life cycle. This includes: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling, and closure.

Throughout this process, you must have clear goals, timelines and review methods in place. You should also tackle every phase with your client’s requirements in mind. Adobe Express can help you track your projects and ensure every stage is handled appropriately.

Is Adobe Express free to use for graphic design?

Yes, you can access a vast selection of templates, assets, tools and much more for graphic design with Adobe Express. Create logos, business cards and much more – you can even use brand colours and fonts to keep everything consistent.

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